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Is "light infantry" a tech? Because Starship Troopers. Just a bunch of easily punctured flesh dudes grabastically charging giant scything deathbugs and dying in droves. Sure would be neat if, oh, say, they were to create a powered suit of armor for these soldiers, maybe they should hire a sci-fi author or something
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May 31, 2020 14:48
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Filthy Hans posted:I'm probably walking into a oh yeah the difference between pro-fascist book and anti-fascist movie are night and day, when I saw the movie I was pissed because I was a Heinlein fanboy who capital letters Didn't Get It.
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Jun 1, 2020 00:55
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trap but Paul Verhoeven was subverting the book and showing how little regard the government really has for enlisted soldiers, lovely equipment was a big part of that
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Balsa posted:What I want to know is why control consoles in Star trek can even explode?! Because (hack) directors need a (cheap) way to demonstrate that a ship got damaged
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Jun 1, 2020 17:17
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Nebakenezzer posted:In contrast, mechanicalized infantry are the dudes who roll with armor. The infantry themselves likely don't require much more in the way of supplies, but now the unit they are in drive APCs that need lots of fuel, ammo, maintenance etc. Speaking of lovely pieces of garbage tech, what's the closest sci-fi analogue to the M2 Bradley 
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Jun 5, 2020 14:31
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mind the walrus posted:I like how part of the joke in Robocop is that not only is the ED-209 a piece of crap, Robocop himself is largely a piece of crap. A focus-grouped piece of crap, even. (Taken to extremes in the sequel) Ghost Leviathan posted:The Wing Zero in the same series might be one of the most powerful Gundams in the series and is even worse; it can drive its pilots mad and might have eaten one of them. wait what?
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Jun 5, 2020 20:33
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Thread winner in every way
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Jun 6, 2020 03:38
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DrBouvenstein posted:Related to the lovely Gundam robots, in Robotech/Macross, they had the transforming Varitech fighters, that were, by and large, good. They got a lot better when they jumped universes to the Inner Sphere.
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Jun 8, 2020 01:43
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RBA Starblade posted:I found out the other day that there are really lovely mechs in Battletech that can transform into really lovely jets, closing the circle Ahhh, LAMs (Land-Air Mechs). The 69 of giant robots, doing two things crappily instead of one thing well. I always figured their in-universe crappiness was essentially a gently caress You to Harmony Gold for all the copyright grief that FASA got. Also, the heart and soul of this thread is this short story by Arthur C. Clarke which should be mandatory reading for every single engineer going through school anywhere, proving that newer and more complex and more capable does not equal better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)
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Jun 9, 2020 14:37
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It was handled well in The Expanse, in which a well-disciplined, far-sighted centuries long terraforming project on Mars fell apart in a few short years once interstellar travel came around. Even the people that occupied New Sci-Fi Sparta went "lol why do this poo poo, hop on a ship and find a better planet"
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Jun 10, 2020 22:23
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Nebakenezzer posted:It turns out the M2 is less lovely than its rep. It's a good vehicle for what it is, though aluminum construction isn't ideal for the forever war IEDs. 40 years of development, as well as rewriting the definition of "what it is" helped get it there. It's no longer the boat anchor on that legendary 60 Minutes segment, but it's still a pretty legendary failure in acquisitions.
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Jun 11, 2020 02:19
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Nebakenezzer posted:It could be that between modern procurement disasters and WW2 era procurement disasters have just changed what counts to me as a legendary failure I mean, there's different criteria in the eras in lives or money. Inbetween tho, it's hard to beat hilarious disasters like the Sergeant York.
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Jun 12, 2020 02:33
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I like how the ultimate collective hive mind decided it needed a sexy queen torso to sex up Picard and get him back
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Jun 21, 2020 02:50
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I still say the idea that the Federation just sends any old failson and weirdo who manages to get a science degree off on a cheap science vessel or distant lab explains so many episodes. It's a giant universe and I always thought the Best and Brightest part of Starfleet rang false. Show me the 2nd line ships. Give me a show with washouts and career dead-enders manning an outdated ship in a forgotten sector.
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Jun 22, 2020 05:56
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Jiminy Christmas! Shoes! posted:
I am so the gently caress over Seth MacFarlane.
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Jun 22, 2020 23:09
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Imagine the murders possible with a transporter. Just rematerialize 30% of the ambassador's arterial wall, please
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Jun 29, 2020 22:45
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galagazombie posted:I know there was at least one time they solved a disease by simply not transporting it along with the person. Scotty knew that "1 to beam up" meant leave the syphiherpAIDS back on the planet with the green women
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Jun 30, 2020 03:18
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My favorite bits of any Star Trek is when aliens point out hypocritical behavior on the Federation and humanity's part.
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Jul 10, 2020 19:32
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Tulip posted:This general idea wound up being an entire major faction in Sword of the Stars. I always wanted a 3D map of the Inner Sphere but it turns out the Battletech creators were reading the star maps wrong when they created it and in real life this stars are wayyyyy different lengths from each other. So essentially every Battletech fan just agrees to pretend there’s no Z-axis in space
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Aug 6, 2020 16:20
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though the game's insistence on an actually 3D star map was 1) cool and 2) headache inducing enough that I get why most games don't do that.
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The great (x1000) grandfather of the Death Star beam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4UsZqy9f1w
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Aug 25, 2020 01:45
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One of the problems with Battletech's static authorship (largely the same people for 40 years) is that nobody's willing to deconstruct the obvious holes in the setting. Imagine one protagonist pointing out that feudal royalty loves Mechs because they're a way to fight that's more "pure" than that of their shitkicker serfs. This has many spillover effects, to the largely duel-based warfare all Mechwarriors engage in, to overspending on procurement of Mechs by every nation around. Not to mention the ridiculous logistical requirements that Mech units would have. A regiment of 108 Mechs would have as high as 30-40 unique designs, each of which has virtually no components in common, each of which has incredibly uniquely shaped and designed limbs and exterior armor plates. Imagine the first merc commander that says "Phoenix Hawks, Marauders, Battlemasters, and that's it". Stock parts for only 3 kinds of Mechs. Also the most expensive part of militaries would still be personnel. Try conquering and holding a hostile planet with 108 Mechs and a few hundred tanks. You'd need high six to low seven figures in people of infantry and support personnel. Imagine a Battletech novel treating Mechs as they are- rare, expensive figureheads piloted by shithead nobles that need an ocean of support to achieve any real strategic military objective.
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Aug 26, 2020 02:03
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Lawman 0 posted:Good god does battletech just need a general reboot I'm not totally against them scrapping all this horseshit and just moving the timeline ahead again a century or so. Come back with more nuanced versions of Space Japan and Space China, and make the Clans less "minor league hockey mascot at the end of an RPG campaign with a Monty Hall DM"
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Aug 26, 2020 15:28
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Lawman 0 posted:Right I mean if you did that you could just have the major houses fall or something and do something like "well these houses were holding back alot of innovation and now you got actual new cultures from the ashes" or whatever. Though I guess even dark age sorta does that? They did, but then they made the factions awful 2-D pastiches that were no better, just to make the little plastic miniatures easier to sell to kids. Tulip posted:Counter proposal: make the clans more minor league hockey. As a long-time Clan hater, I'm....not against that.
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Aug 26, 2020 22:46
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SlothfulCobra posted:In Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers, there's a supercomputer at a jail called the Aequitas that has the main purpose of determining guilt, which is a weird thing, but it is a society of robots. What's lovely about it is that its password can by bypassed by a Transformer willingly dying to open it up, which both is inconvenient and not secure if you happen to run into particularly motivated attackers. Ehhh....some of that isn't how I took it. Overlord set up all the Autobot deathmatches both as a sadistic way to gently caress with the former captors/prison guards, and as a way to pass time until Megatron took notice and came running. The password thing wasn't something inherently designed into Aequitas; Overlord basically used the jail's former warden as a way to solve the problem and to torture him. The dumbest contrivance in the whole TF series has to be Vector Sigma. The one thing that can create new life (apart from all the other times in other episodes they did  )is buried at the center of their planet, mostly forgotten, and requires a MacGuffin key to use.
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Jan 2, 2021 06:44
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SlothfulCobra posted:Of course in I think literally the next episode after that arc, the combaticons show up and there's no explanation for where they came from. That one actually made a smattering of sense; they were prisoners on Cybertron that literally had been removed from their bodies and just cold stored as hardware. Starscream snuck in and stole them, then (sigh, this is where it gets back to being dumb) put them into the rusted remnants of some WWII era military hardware he found on Guadalcanal. My favorite dumb gadget in Transformers was the Solar Needle, which takes solar energy directly from the sun, and also somehow needs a part from the grumpiest Autobot there is, Gears. If you use it for two hours, it blows up the sun.
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Jan 2, 2021 08:05
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muscles like this! posted:In that vein there's the Avenue 5 from the TV show Avenue 5. It is a big fancy space cruise ship with a control room out of Star Trek, except all that stuff is just for show because outside of the passenger area the ship is dingy and utilitarian, including the actual control room. They even have a fake bridge crew and captain who are actors hired for their looks. As someone who did many maintenance jobs in shipyards on cruise ships, this is actually stunningly accurate
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Jan 25, 2021 07:37
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Most of the Titanicus fiction I remember was about how the "Machine Spirits" were barely controllable, and immediately engaged in a clash of wills with any Princeps who dared try to pilot it.
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Jan 26, 2021 17:27
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It didn't work for them, rather spectacularly. Although that had more to do with it not really being a merger so much as a plundering.
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Jan 28, 2021 21:09
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SolarFire2 posted:Alternatively: The Killbot Solution. Engineer your supersoldiers to have a pre-set kill limit at which point they expire. It worked for Zapp Brannigan.
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Jan 29, 2021 17:56
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poo poo, he can easily crush his own arms with his own robot arms. Not to mention any tumble or fall and bye-bye fleshy arm. The picture belongs in the thread
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Feb 9, 2021 06:15
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SlothfulCobra posted:And then there's questions like "why do the police even have a tank" and "why do you need spiky all-terrain treads that will shred up the street" and it's been a long while since I read it, but I think there were a lot of jokes about the tank being pretty horribly suited to most of the police work they were doing. I've only ever seen the anime, but the entire theme was very much "why the gently caress do the police have tanks"
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Feb 10, 2021 12:50
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:what happens if someone starts jamming the radio frequencies used for those remote operations? Tangentially, we discovered in a big way early in Iraq 2 that while putting all your eggs in the satcom basket was fine for peacetime, the bandwidth requirements for a fully networked military at war quickly overwhelmed everything the DoD had in space. They leased every bit of available commercial bandwidth, and started digging some old Vietnam-era toys out of the closet like HF radio. (All public knowledge at this point) That didn't even require a bad actor downing a satellite or two (which our major peers have the capability to do). If GPS goes down, a huuuugeee part of military functionality goes with it.
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Feb 11, 2021 07:04
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wdarkk posted:You would think a faraday cage would cost way less than a time machine. I assumed it was something way weirder. It was a plot contrivance to justify the concept. Whatever writer that was tasked with pulling it off with like 2-3 lines of exposition didn't get the job done.
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Mar 9, 2021 04:46
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Mycroft Holmes posted:I already had a vasectomy when I was 24, so sure, bring on the genemods. What the hell doctor did it? I'd always heard about doctors being adamant about not doing it for younger dudes
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Mar 27, 2021 03:23
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